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The North Korea Summit Through the Looking Glass

By Branko Marcetic

As much of the world celebrates a modest step towards peace in Korea, Western pundits seem to be panicking.

On Tuesday, as Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un shook hands for their much-anticipated summit in Singapore, one Korean reporter observed a curious episode< http://www. koreaherald.com/view.php?ud= 20180612000772>. Koreans watching the scene unfold on a TV screen at a railway station in Seoul began applauding. Meanwhile, some nearby Western tourists, perturbed by this development, scratched their heads in confusion.

“I am actually baffled to see them clapping here,” said one British tourist.

There’s perhaps no better symbol of the gulf in worldwide reactions to the summit than this episode. While South Koreans cautiously celebrated a historic step in the thawing of hostilities that have hung over them for almost seventy years, the Western media seemed to look on with alarm — even anger.

Hostility to the summit, much of it from Democrats and liberals< https://jacobinmag. com/2018/06/trump-north-korea- kim-negotiations-deal>, had been a staple of press coverage in the months leading up to it, often from commentators who just a few months earlier had been panicking about exactly the opposite outcome. But it reached a fever pitch over the last few days.

Much of the criticism focused on the fact that Trump had offered to suspend US and South Korean war games — apparently without informing the South Koreans — and to withdraw some troops from the country. (A regular feature of establishment anti-Trump coverage is that he is both an unhinged maniac ready to start war at any moment, and that under no circumstances should he reduce the size and scope of US military power.)

“This. Is. Fucking. Nuts,” wrote< https://www.motherjones. com/kevin-drum/2018/06/donald- trump-abandons-south-korea/> Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum in reaction to the deal, in a column titled “Donald Trump Abandons South Korea.” Weighing the concessions Kim won against what Trump received (“nothing”), Drum determined that “this whole thing looks like the same kind of train wreck dealmaking that produced the Trump Plaza Hotel.” The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland called< https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2018/jun/12/trump-nuclear- north-korea-kim-jong-un> the deal “a historic breakthrough — for the Kim dynasty,” citing just about every boilerplate criticism so far listed. Freedland wrote that a “useful way to test the deal” was to imagine what Trump would have said if Obama had negotiated it — an odd point, given that liberals have (rightly) spent years complaining about Trump’s ignorant, bad-faith attacks on the Iran deal.

If this coverage were all one were exposed to, it would be hard to be left with any other impression than that Trump had just single-handedly sealed the doom of South Korea, and indeed the whole world. Which begs the question: Why do Koreans themselves seem surprisingly okay with it?

One ominous result is that liberals, panicked at the idea that Trump might receive credit for lowering the risk of war, are starting to become increasingly militaristic. It will be a sad irony if it ends up being Democrats who torpedo Moon’s quest for peace.

The agreement is, of course, far from perfect and not above criticism. But despite the breathless denunciations of Trump for talking to a dictator — and let’s be honest: many of these come from the same people who hail the Saudi crown prince< https://www.jacobinmag. com/2017/11/muhammad-bin- salman-saudi-arabia-hotel- arrests> as a modernist reformer — what’s unfolding right now is probably the best outcome in a bad situation. Koreans themselves seem to realize this. Why can’t our pundits?Φ

Branko Marcetic is an editorial assistant at Jacobin. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. This article appeared on June 13 at Jacobin.